ALL OF ME

Have you ever been struck by sound that leaves you in a place of both longing and completion? A place where time seems to lengthen until it shifts dimensions and becomes light? A tunnel that narrows thought and understanding to a revelation that you never knew you needed?

These questions might come off as complicated or at least rhetorical. Even as I reread these questions, my thoughts chastise me. Do I really want you to answer? In truth, I don’t want a yes or no, but I do want you to pause and imagine a moment in which sound is or has been the catalyst to the aforementioned understanding or revelation. I want your participation. I want your voice to join mine.

Yikes. I’ve just made this complicated. And esoteric. But this experience of longing and completion, shifting dimensions, and understanding leading to revelation is not complicated for me; it’s become almost commonplace. Also, maybe that’s why I’m making a muddle of my description of its pull. This experience, this place, has become an innate and simple one in my life. Its simplicity doesn’t make it less, though; it makes it more.

I find myself here when I am singing—singing alone or in harmony—particularly in harmony. The music begs me to stretch and lengthen beyond the norm. The music is in me. I can’t remove its caress, and I would never want to. It lives in my body and grounds me in breath and presence. It’s simple because it feels innate. It’s simple because I crave it like a clean line as it bends with others to create something unexpectedly multiplied.

I’ve often talked about the feeling of “flow” in writing as something we chase. We chase it just like we chase understanding. We are longing for the completion and the exhilaration it brings on the other side. And when we find it, that feeling sticks with us and creates muscle memory in the body. For me, it’s effervescent, the bubbles exciting me into an almost frenzy as I type or handwrite my thoughts teetering in seeming silence. No one could look at me sitting quietly alone at my writing desk or on the couch and guess the heated rhapsody I’m experiencing beneath my skin. No one can hear my words singing in my heart and mind. And make no mistake, they are singing, but only I can hear them. It’s my secret. The words, the message, the meaning, the understanding are just for me. (At least they are just for me in that moment.)

Music—singing— is different. As a vocalist, I’m in front of people sharing this gift in real time, in rhythmic time. Writing is singular at its beginning, whereas singing is more communal. When I’m on stage, my voice exists inside and outside of my body. I hear it moving in my heart, in my lungs, in my throat, and then it catapults out and boomerangs around the room until it reenters me. I can feel it in my ears and on my skin just as surely as I feel the words I write beneath my skin. Both bring out a simplicity in me: I know who I am when I write. I know who I am when I sing.

I am my voice. 

I said before that writing is more singular and singing more communal. And because it’s my prerogative, I’m going to take that back. Writing is only singular, because I am alone in that moment of putting words on the page, but am I really alone? No. Every experience of my life is with me colluding with memory to bring out my message and meaning. Perhaps my writing voice isn’t so much singing a lone melody but weaving all of the notes, the melody, and the harmonies together to create a piece both unexpected and familiar, just like song.

I am my voice. That’s the simplest and most revelatory sentence I’ve written in a while. I feel it lengthening me with promise, stretching me into and out of my comfort. My voice feels familiar. It feels consistent, even when it feels uncertain. And when it streams from me in winding bands of light and life and color, it feels new and unexpected just as surely as it feels known.

My voice is a song I want to sing for a lifetime and more, across dimensions. Do I really feel like I travel from one dimension to another with my voice? Well… yes. When I am writing, when I am singing, when I am sharing in the creation of a story, time disappears. Sometimes I feel like I have expanded or shrunk to just the words—I feel safe in my voice, in the words, in this revelation. I can last here. I can be everything here. There are no bars holding me, no boxes confining me. I am all of me, and in this moment, that feels simple.

Photo by Harry Shelton on Unsplash